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On the Life and Work of S. Helgason

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On the Life and Work of S. Helgason Contemporary Mathematics On the Life and Work of S. Helgason G. Ólafsson and R. J. Stanton Abstract. This article is a contribution to a Festschrift for S. Helgason. After a biographical sketch, we survey some of his research on several topics in geometric and harmonic analysis during his long and influential career. While not an exhaustive presentation of all facets of his research, for those topics covered we include reference to the current status of these areas. Preface Sigurður Helgason is known worldwide for his first book Differential Geometry and Symmetric Spaces. With this book he provided an entrance to the opus of Élie Cartan and Harish-Chandra to generations of mathematicians. On this the occa- sion of his 85th birthday we choose to reflect on the impact of Sigurður Helgason’s sixty years of mathematical research. He was among the first to investigate system- atically the analysis of differential operators on reductive homogeneous spaces. His research on Radon-like transforms for homogeneous spaces presaged the resurgence of activity on this topic and continues to this day. Likewise he gave a geomet- rically motivated approach to harmonic analysis of symmetric spaces. Of course there is much more - eigenfunctions of invariant differential operators, propagation properties of differential operators, differential geometry of homogeneous spaces, historical profiles of mathematicians. Here we shall present a survey of some of these contributions, but first a brief look at the man. 1. Short Biography arXiv:1210.6071v2 [math.RT] 24 Mar 2013 Sigurður Helgason was born on September 30, 1927 in Akureyri, in northern Iceland. His parents were Helgi Skúlason (1892-1983) and Kara Sigurðardóttir Briem (1900-1982), and he had a brother Skúli Helgason (1926-1973) and a sister Sigriður Helgadóttir (1933-2003). Akureyri was then the second largest city in Iceland with about 3,000 people living there, whereas the population of Iceland was about 103,000. As with other cities in northern Iceland, Akureyri was isolated, having only a few roads so that horses or boats were the transportation of choice. Its schools, based on Danish traditions, were good. The Gymnasium in Akureyri 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary: 43A85. G.Ólafsson acknowledges the support of NSF Grant DMS-1101337 during the preparation of this article. c 0000 (copyright holder) 1 2 G.ÓLAFSSONANDR.J.STANTON was established in 1930 and was the second Gymnasium in Iceland. There Helgason studied mathematics, physics, languages, amongst other subjects during the years 1939-1945. He then went to the University of Iceland in Reykjavík where he enrolled in the school of engineering, at that time the only way there to study mathematics. In 1946 he began studies at the University of Copenhagen from which he received the Gold Medal in 1951 for his work on Nevanlinna-type value distribution theory for analytic almost-periodic functions. His paper on the subject became his master’s thesis in 1952. Much later a summary appeared in [H89]. Leaving Denmark in 1952 he went to Princeton University to complete his graduate studies. He received a Ph.D. in 1954 with the thesis, Banach Algebras and Almost Periodic Functions, under the supervision of Salomon Bochner. He began his professional career as a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at M.I.T. 1954- 56. After leaving Princeton his interests had started to move towards two areas that remain the main focus of his research. The first, inspired by Harish-Chandra’s ground breaking work on the representation theory of semisimple Lie groups, was Lie groups and harmonic analysis on symmetric spaces; the second was the Radon transform, the motivation having come from reading the page proofs of Fritz John’s famous 1955 book Plane Waves and Spherical Means. He returned to Princeton for 1956-57 where his interest in Lie groups and symmetric spaces led to his first work on applications of Lie theory to differential equations, [H59]. He moved to the University of Chicago for 1957-59, where he started work on his first book [H62]. He then went to Columbia University for the fruitful period 1959-60, where he shared an office with Harish-Chandra. In 1959 he joined the faculty at M.I.T. where he has remained these many years, being full professor since 1965. The periods 1964-66, 1974-75, 1983 (fall) and 1998 (spring) he spent at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the periods 1970-71 and 1995 (fall) at the Mittag-Leffler Institute, Stockholm. He has been awarded a degree Doctoris Honoris Causa by several universities, notably the University of Iceland, the University of Copenhagen and the University of Uppsala. In 1988 the American Mathematical Society awarded him the Steele Prize for expository writing citing his book Differential Geometry and Symmetric Spaces and its sequel. Since 1991 he carries the Major Knights Cross of the Icelandic Falcon. 2. Mathematical Research In the Introduction to his selected works, [Sel], Helgason himself gave a personal description of his work and how it relates to his published articles. We recommend this for the clarity of exposition we have come to expect from him as well as the insight it provides to his motivation. An interesting interview with him also may be found in [S09]. Here we will discuss parts of this work, mostly those familiar to us. We start with his work on invariant differential operators, continuing with his work on Radon transforms, his work related to symmetric spaces and representation theory, then a sketch of his work on wave equations. 2.1. Invariant Differential Operators. Invariant differential operators have always been a central subject of investigation by Helgason. We find it very infor- mative to read his first paper on the subject [H59]. In retrospect, this shines a beacon to follow through much of his later work on this subject. Here we find a ONTHELIFEANDWORKOFS.HELGASON 3 lucid introduction to differential operators on manifolds and the geometry of ho- mogeneous spaces, reminiscient of the style to appear in his famous book [H62]. Specializing to a reductive homogeneous space, he begins the study of D(G/H), those differential operators that commute with the action of the group of isome- tries. The investigation of this algebra of operators will occupy him through many years. What is the relationship of D(G/H) to D(G) and what is the relationship of D(G/H) to the center of the universal enveloping algebra? Harish-Chandra had just described his isomorphism of the center of the universal enveloping algebra with the Weyl invariants in the symmetric algebra of a Cartan subalgebra, so Hel- gason introduces this to give an alternative description of D(G/H). But the goal is always to understand analysis on the objects, so he investigates several problems, variations of which will weave throughout his research. For symmetric spaces X = G/K the algebra D(X) was known to be commu- tative, and Godement had formulated the notion of harmonic function in this case obtaining a mean value characterization. Harmonic functions being joint eigen- functions of D(X) for the eigenvalue zero, one could consider eigenfunctions for other eigenvalues. Indeed, Helgason shows that the zonal spherical functions are also eigenfunctions for the mean value operator. When X is a two-point homoge- neous space, and with Ásgeirsson’s result on mean value properties for solutions of the ultrahyperbolic Laplacian in Euclidean space in mind, Helgason formulates and proves an extension of it to these spaces. Here D(X) has a single generator, the Laplacian, for which he constructs geometrically a fundamental solution, thereby allowing him to study the inhomogeneous problem for the Laplacian. This paper contains still more. In many ways the two-point homogeneous spaces are ideal gen- eralizations of Euclidean spaces so following F. John [J55] he is able to define a Radon like transform on the constant curvature ones and identify an inversion op- erator. Leaving the Riemannian case, Helgason considers harmonic Lorentz space G/H. He shows D(G/H) is generated by the natural second order operator; he ob- tains a mean value theorem for suitable solutions of the generator and an explicit inverse for the mean value operator. Finally, he examines the wave equation on harmonic Lorentz spaces and shows the failure of Huygens principle in the non-flat case. Building on these results he subsequently examines the question of existence of fundamental solutions more generally. He solves this problem for symmetric spaces as he shows that every D ∈ D(X) has a fundamental solution, [H64, Thm. 4.2]. ∞ ′ Thus, there exists a distribution T ∈ Cc (X) such that DT = δxo . Convolution ∞ then provides a method to solve the inhomogeneous problem, namely, if f ∈ Cc (X) then there exists u ∈ C∞(X) such that Du = f. Those results had been announced in [H63c]. The existence of the fundamental solution uses the deep results of Harish-Chandra on the aforementioned isomorphism as well as classic results of Hörmander on constant coefficient operators. It is an excellent example of the combination of the classical theory with the semisimple theory. Here is a sketch of his approach. In his classic paper [HC58] on zonal spherical functions, Harish-Chandra in- troduced several important concepts to handle harmonic analysis. One was the appropriate notion of a Schwartz-type space of K bi-invariant functions, there de- noted I(G). I(G) with the appropriate topology is a Fréchet space, and having ∞ K Cc (X) as a dense convolution subalgebra. 4 G.ÓLAFSSONANDR.J.STANTON Another notion from [HC58] is the Abel transform ρ Ff (a)= a f(an) dn . ZN Today this is also called the ρ-twisted Radon transform and denoted Rρ.
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